Sarah Mullally became the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury on March 25, 2026 — the first woman to lead the Church of England and the global Anglican Communion in 1,400 years of history. Below is a feature interview drawing on her public statements, sermon excerpts, and reported interviews in the lead-up to and following her enthronement.
The woman who is now the spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide walked 87 miles to get to her enthronement.
From St Paul’s Cathedral in London — where she had served as Bishop of London since 2018 — Sarah Mullally walked the ancient pilgrimage route to Canterbury Cathedral in Kent over six days, arriving just before her installation ceremony. She is the first Archbishop of Canterbury in modern history to have made the journey on foot. It was not a publicity stunt. By all accounts, it was exactly what it looked like: a woman preparing herself, in the oldest and most physical way available, for the weight of what she was about to carry.
“Here I Am”
When she delivered her inaugural sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, she opened with the simplest possible words: “As I begin my ministry today as Archbishop of Canterbury, I say again to God: ‘Here I am.'”
It is a phrase from Isaiah 6 — the same chapter in which the prophet, having encountered the holiness of God, responds to the divine call not with a strategy or a manifesto but with a simple, total self-offering. Here I am. Send me.
For a woman who left a distinguished career as Britain’s Chief Nursing Officer to answer what she describes as a call to ordained ministry — who was ordained a priest at 40, became a bishop at 53, and now leads the world’s third-largest Christian communion at 64 — those words carry autobiographical weight. Her entire life has been a series of “Here I am” moments: to medicine, to the NHS, to the church, to the episcopate, and now to Canterbury.
On Walking Into a Divided Church
Mullally’s appointment came after her predecessor Justin Welby resigned in November 2024 following a report that found the Church of England had failed to protect children from abuse by a volunteer, and that Welby had not reported the abuse to authorities when he learned of it in 2013. She inherits a church in genuine crisis — bruised by the abuse scandal, divided over questions of sexuality and same-sex blessings, and facing decades of declining Sunday attendance in England.
She has been direct about the abuse dimension from the start: “We must remain committed to truth, compassion, justice and action. We must not overlook or minimise the pain experienced by those who have been harmed through the actions, inactions or failures of those in our own Christian churches and communities.”
Her years as Chief Nursing Officer — managing a workforce of hundreds of thousands in an institution that had its own profound safeguarding failures — have prepared her, she believes, for exactly this kind of institutional reckoning. “She always seems very calm, in control, self-contained,” said Church Times journalist Madeleine Davies. “She’s got quite a peaceable presence, and I think that will be reassuring to people.”
On the Anglican Communion’s Divisions
The Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GAFCON) — a network of theologically conservative Anglican churches, predominantly in Africa and Asia — has strongly objected to Mullally’s appointment, arguing that a woman should not serve as Archbishop and that her progressive theological positions on sexuality disqualify her from leading the Communion. The Church of Uganda’s Stephen Kaziimba called her appointment “sad.” Rwanda’s Laurent Mbanda argued it proved Canterbury could “no longer function as a credible leader of Anglicans.”
Mullally’s response to this has been characteristically measured: “We’re a family with a shared root, and with any global church, there is great diversity in it.” She has spoken repeatedly about holding the tension of unity and diversity — about seeking to lead a communion that is genuinely global and genuinely diverse, without forcing a false uniformity.
Other African voices have strongly welcomed her appointment. Emily Onyango, Kenya’s first female Anglican bishop: “Things will be done differently. We know there will be justice in the church.” Cape Town’s Archbishop Thabo Makgoba: “A thrilling development.”
On Her Faith Journey
Asked about the moment her faith became real, Mullally has spoken about her teenage years: “As I look back over my life at the teenage Sarah, who put her faith in God and made a commitment to follow Jesus, I could never have imagined the future that lay ahead, and certainly not the ministry to which I am now called.”
The Dean of Canterbury described her as a person of “really deep and profound faith” — evidenced, he said, by the fact that she walked away from a prestigious career at the peak of her professional powers to answer a call to ordained ministry. “That’s a big, risky thing to do,” he said. “It’s born of somebody who had a lively sense of faith and connection with God, sufficient for her to hear a call to turn in a different direction.”
On What She Hopes to Leave Behind
Sarah Mullally has six years until the mandatory retirement age of 70. She has spoken about what she hopes her tenure will mean — not in terms of policy positions or institutional victories, but in terms of character and witness.
“We walk with God — trusting that God walks with us,” she said in her enthronement sermon. “Trusting that — in all that we face, in the sorrow and the challenges as much as in the joy and the delight — we do not walk alone.”
For a church that has felt, in recent years, very much alone in its pain — the abuse scandal, the divisions, the declining congregations, the cultural marginalisation — those words may be the most important thing the new Archbishop could have said.
Here I am. We do not walk alone. That is her offer to the 85 million Anglicans who are now, in some meaningful sense, her responsibility.
It remains to be seen what she will do with it. But the woman who walked 87 miles to her own enthronement is not, one suspects, easily discouraged.
